By August the remains will be a rope in dust, a theology, a brown snake too limp with sun to struggle. I return it to the house, unless it’s rotten, and consider the year, the hole that gapes in the seatboard. How emptied I must be, day after day. Easter on, I feed the rope…
It may all have started in nothing more than your adolescent fascination with the future: whom shall I marry — rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief? and the slavewomam’s contribution may at first have been no more than fortune-telling: an eggwhite in a glass. But for one of you, the glass held a specter in…
A few poplars stand by the frozen river. Over the lashed and flowing wilderness dull daylight stretches the sky to a wheel of slate-blue edges. Night is Norwegian Finmark blue. Fathers of cold winters, mothers and children with white teeth, all fade away toward evening. Twilight gathers pulkkas and reindeer into its wilderness. Then ropes…
Cold-blooded, the surface just above its head is collared light, ragging my reflection in a blinding lace of ice, below which it lifts like an insulated wire. I roll my sleeve, reach down and pinch its neck, hard as a bullet, then draw upward, dragging the tail from under a brick. Slowly, I coil its…
It was a respectable family I was born into. My father kept an inn; he left money and land, but after his death there was bickering among the relatives, and I got little of his estate. My first husband died young; my second was feckless and unlucky. We lost our few acres, so that…
I Where the gray beast of the water cornered itself into harbor, that mouth amid whiteness gasped on the raw deck a secret thrust from beneath the brittle hide of the sea — This surfaces again as I lurch awake speechless and wet in the gray dawn, caught in the webbed sheets:…
We put aside a daughter: shoebox of ashes tucked beneath a fruit tree that half-bloomed in sandy soil behind the barn. Locals said her life was with another man. In His home, they said, she is His tree. He climbs her, this sufferer, heart so wan. Jesus on the tree! The unfinished son, an idea’s…
She was not yet six, hale and well-looking, farmed out, as her siblings had been; ward of a Putnam, whose relatives had brought the charges against her — she had taken the shape of a dog, they said, and was roaming the countryside, biting the girls. No man relished presenting her in court. The marshal,…
I live here, but do not live here. Trash blows through the sky tonight. Out of a snowy tree, the stars appear, drops of ice-water, they seem so pure. The tree petrifies. They are its parasites. I live here, but do not live here. `Fusion’ was the word I loved — its nuclear logic. The…
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